Page 41 - Security Today, April 2021

“Often, background checks are in place to ensure suitability for the workplace, kickstarting a trust relationship rather than forming it organically over months and years.”
servation will help employees gain confidence in workplace safety. Wellness is the new suitable. While wellness is a new dimension of suitability, it does not replace background checks. Background checks continue to be essential for higher security facilities. Well-
ness checking is important for every facility.
Wellness is a temporal and dynamic attribute. Wellness screen-
ings must occur daily, as today’s results have no bearing on to- morrow. Employees we know and see in the office daily represent the identical wellness risk as a visitor we have never seen before. Wellness screenings must be done for everybody -- every day -- us- ing the same process and same tools. If any person will be access- ing any part of a facility where any of your employees might be, wellness screening must be done.
Wellness screening is for, not by humans. In any security disci- pline, the decision between manual security controls and investment in automated controls is expressed in two questions: Is this a repeti- tious activity (and inherently risks degradation over time)? What is the impact/cost of any failure of the control? Even without the bias challenges, wellness screening should not be performed manually.
Wellness screening can be efficient. Security programs have tried to make physical access and visitor management as low friction as possible and should do the same for wellness screening. Well-
ness screenings are here to stay, as we do not know what pandemic episodes loom in our future. If you make this necessity bearable, it won’t befall the same fate as other security initiatives that didn’t take user experience into account. A wellness screening process too cumbersome will first suffer active attempts to circumvent it, ma- turing to subversion and naturally concluding with abandonment.
Make wellness matter. Security programs measure the effective- ness of their security controls. If a wellness screening capability has no discernable effect, it will be both ineffective and obvious to the entire organization that it is just security theater. Demonstrating that wellness screening affects access to the facility in an automated way can generate confidence in the safety of a workplace.
An organization that implements a capability to automatically disable facility access for those who fail wellness screening (or disable access for everyone nightly) can inspire confidence with this suitability information. In this context, wellness screening is due diligence. Doing something with the knowledge gained is due care. Considering how liability has historically been apportioned in similar situations, this requires careful examination by risk, le- gal and human resource departments.
The best security capabilities deployed in recent times all share one quality: innovation. Systems that achieved their protective goal but brought other added value in so doing. As security prac- titioners, we should be looking for ways to do this. Back-to-work represents a possibly once-in-a-career opportu-
nity to address a risk that no one has worked
on before. Managing ever-changing and evolv-
ing risks is our norm. It’s up to us to make
back-to-work, work well.
Jeff Nigriny is the CEO of CertiPath.
WWW.SECURITYTODAY.COM 41 Untitled-11 1 3/5/21 10:02 AM